Assassin's Creed III a result of Ubisoft's big-team management skills

Why it'll be a while before you see Post Arcade's Assassin's Creed III review

You may be dropping by Post Arcade today looking for our Assassin’s Creed III review. (Thanks for that!)

We’d have liked nothing more than to have provided a timely review of this made-in-Canada blockbuster. Unfortunately, Ubisoft declined to provide Post Arcade with pre-release access to the game, effectively nixing that possibility.

But we’re doing the best we can. We picked up a copy first thing this morning and one of our reviewers is feverishly playing even as you read this.

However, given the game’s length — and our intent to provide a thoughtful review of the complete experience — we won’t be posting a review anytime soon.

Look for our full review of Assassin’s Creed III early next week. And for those of you who can’t wait to play, perhaps we’ll see you in the Animus…

It takes a lot of people to make a game like Assassin’s Creed III, and the fact that Ubisoft Entertainment SA’s Montreal studio seems to have mastered managing all those people is one of the main reasons they’ve had so much success this console generation.

It didn’t used to be like this. In the last generation of consoles, teams in the hundreds were the exception instead of the rule and games with more than three or four hundred people working on them were very rare indeed.

But if you look at Assassin’s Creed III, you can see why Ubisoft would need hundreds of staffers to pull the thing off. There are huge open areas of wilderness and city that the player can move through freely. There are hundreds of hours of recorded voice work. You can hunt in the frozen forest and battle ships at high-sea. All that stuff doesn’t build itself.

One shouldn’t assume that it’s easy to build the huge console games that have come to typify top-tier triple-A development in the past seven years. Many companies have failed to adapt to the shift and have had their fortunes shift dramatically.

A perfect example of where this process broke down was with this month’s Resident Evil 6. At one point there were more than 600 people working on the game. And while Capcom certainly wound up with a a deep and expansive game, the end product was mostly disjointed and much sloppier than it should have been.

Similarly, when Square-Enix set out to make Final Fantasy XIII, the entire project sprawled over five years and felt like it had large portions cut from it. Final Fantasy Versus XIII, a game announced in 2006, still hasn’t come out yet.

On the other hand, companies such as Ubisoft with their Assassin’s Creed games and Activision with Call of Duty, have been able to leverage hundreds of developers and designers at different studios to output surprisingly coherent and mostly polished products.

To make last year’s Assassin’s Creed Revelations, more than seven Ubisoft satellite studios had to come in to do work on the project. The credit roll on Assassin’s Creed III is reportedly 20 mins long. The fact that these sub-studios could come in and do this work relatively seamlessly is frankly a monument to the planning and managerial skills of those at Ubisoft.

Frankly, to be able to turn out the huge games that most players expect on their console systems these days the most important skill for these companies to have is the ability to organize and direct these large groups of people effectively.

It used to be that when large portions of a game were outsourced, the quality of the entire project would suffer. Yet, today’s games, essentially require huge teams to produce high quality games like Assassin’s Creed III more than once a console cycle.

Ubisoft has proven it can do this. Activison has as well. Electronic Arts Inc., after a few major sub-studio shutdowns, seems to have proven this as well.

Now as we turn our eyes toward the next console generation, this skill, more than any other will prove to be the one that differentiates the successful companies from the also-rans.